


baptismal sin

by morningstar921



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Baptism, Crowley's Name is Crawly | Crawley (Good Omens), Gen, Light Angst, The Fall (Good Omens), because crowley sure does, to be baptized by fire, until it's not, well take that literally, you know the saying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22797148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morningstar921/pseuds/morningstar921
Summary: It starts, as it ends, with fire. Or, Crowley and his various “christenings” throughout history: in the pool of boiling sulfur, in the Flood, at the hands of John the Baptist, and in hellfire.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	baptismal sin

It starts, as it ends, with fire. 

The Almighty makes no appearance but he knows She charged the others to do Her dirty work, to take that which She bore him with: his grace, his halo, his name. It’s hard to say which one hurts most. The angel Gabriel stands at the helm in Her stead, righteous above all. A false idol, one could say, but the favored son never feels the sting of the whip. 

He is the last to fall. He falls like the stars he made for Her -- and maybe watching Her cast them across the newly-made sky (shooting stars, She called them, shot as if from the barrel of a gun not yet made) should have been warning enough. But where those stars fall endlessly into driftless space, the rebellious fall into a burning rift She strikes into the earth and then seals over their heads. 

Not very motherly, he thinks, and then is too busy screaming to think much of anything else. 

Crawling out of the sludge the boiling sulphur makes of his body -- skin sloughed off and melted bone, wings plastered to the ruined skin of his back -- is like a second birth. Like crawling from the womb as those creatures on earth do, slathered in blood (though their mother’s and not their own is incidental). 

A horde of fallen angels stand gathered around a raised rock structure. Someone is on top of it, just as bloody and beaten as the rest but stanced strong in spite of it. They look familiar as do all the fallen angels, but he does not remember their name. Another thing taken.

They point to him from all the way across the crowd. “Another fallen brother,” they cry. Their voice is hoarse, vocal cords grated thin. 

He shrinks back and hisses as his foot dips back into sulphur. He tries a greeting but his own voice catches in his throat and he chokes on it.

The fallen angel steps down from their rock. The crowd parts for them. They stop where he lays broken in a heap. They do not touch him, but they do not kick him to the earth like the Almighty Host did. As far as things go, it’s quite an improvement. “You need a name.”

He nods. There is blood running down the back of his throat.

They take a minute to field suggestions from the crowd. Seems all the good ones have been taken. He tries to bring himself to his feet and he makes it only barely, his legs wobbling as if boneless. No one else looks this unsteady. The fall was harder on him. He doesn’t wish to know why. He forgoes his pride and collapses to his knees again, crawling a couple inches closer to the crowd. 

“You’re a crawly one, aren’t you? Legs don’t work right? You might as well slither on your belly like a serpent.” And they catch a glimpse of his slitted eyes through the tar weighing down his eyelashes, and they smirk. “Crawly. That’s your name. Crawly.”

Crawly. Not much of a dignified name, but it’ll do. The fallen angel leaves Crawly lying on the edge of the sulfur pit and rallies the others in the crowd to assemble a new home, here in this crack between worlds. Their name is Lord Beelzebub, self-crowned Prince of Hell, and Crawly looks at them like they’re the last dying hope he has.

Weak knees be damned. He forces his legs to hold him upright and stumbles like a drunkard after Beelzebub.

* * *

It is evidently hard to abandon the old rules, easier instead to shift them leftways a bit and hope that’s disguise enough. It leaves Hell feeling a little too like Heaven for Crawly’s taste. Dank as it is, chaotic as it is, Hell is still a reflection of heaven. And Beelzebub might as well be pretty-boy Gabriel in a filthier suit and rasping lisp for how bureaucratic and entitled they’ve become.

Hell doesn’t feel like any kind of home anymore so after the last time he was recalled down below and released again (sometime vaguely after that ghastly Cain and Abel thing), Crawly vows to return as little and as sparingly as possible. Even when that peculiar angel Aziraphale tells him the Almighty is going to drown Her own creations, Crawly refuses to sink below the dirt.

“Where are you going to go then?” Aziraphale asks. 

“I don’t know, I figured I’d climb a hill or something.”

“A hill!” Aziraphale’s face contorts into something like concern -- preposterous, really, to show concern for your sworn enemy -- but just as quickly smooths away into indifference. “Don’t think this means I care, but that has to be the worst idea I’ve ever heard. Did you think this through at all?”

Crawly squints against the sun. “Eh, not really. I’m winging it.” He watches one of Noah’s sons try ridiculously to shoo a pair of birds into the Ark and snorts.

“You do realize the entire planet is being flooded.”

“Your man Noah is building a boat to withstand the Almighty’s divine wrath. A boat, angel. I think I’ll be fine.”

He is not, in fact, fine. 

While Aziraphale rides out forty days and forty nights of constant rain as a guardian aboard the Ark, Crawly climbs to the top of the tallest mountain he can find and lasts only three days before the water rises above his head. 

Drowning is breathless and glorious. The water settles deep in Crawly’s lungs, fans his hair out like a melting flame. And, caught in the rage of the storm, he floats. This is a culling, a cleansing, but he feels at peace. As his lungs collapse and this sack of flesh falters, Crawly wonders if, like the humans, he is meant to be redeemed by the flood.

He wakes up in hell, discorporated but still choking on water. Redemption is for schmucks, anyway.

* * *

The Almighty has a son, some scrawny human She names Jesus, and Crawly of course keeps his eye on the boy. Can’t let Her muck up another one, now can he. He takes the boy on a forty day jaunt across the known world, shows him everything he could have if he would just forsake Her. The boy only smiles sadly at Crawly. Crawly abandons him at a cliffside, storming off afoul. 

It’s not until he’s miles off into the desert that he sees the irony in it. Imagine, a demon singing the praises of damnation. He might laugh if it weren’t so pathetic. 

If one good thing came from his time with that Jesus fellow, it was news of his cousin, some hermit dunking people into water and calling them blessed. No mortal on earth remembers the flood but damn it all if they don’t seem to sense its lingering wrath in the air (even if the Almighty, suspiciously so, seems to have mellowed out these days). Subject yourself to a minor drowning and redemption is yours, the Original Sin washed off as easily as if muck on your skin. 

Naturally, Crawly goes to investigate.

The baptist is submerged knee-deep in a burbling river cut straight through an outcropping of rock. There’s a not-insignificantly sized group of people crowded around him and the woman he has gathered in his arms. He murmurs something before dipping the woman backwards below the water, her head covering billowing out behind her. She is submerged only for a few seconds before the baptist raises her and she comes gasping out of the water. The woman smiles. She steps out of the water and the next person takes her place. 

Crawly watches as person after person is cleansed at the hands of this baptist. He scoffs; there is nothing holy enough about this man for any of this to mean anything. It’s all empty effort. 

“Hello! Have you come to join us today?”

Crawly startles. The baptist, with a tall man fresh from submersion held in his arms, turns his eyes on Crawly. His eyes are sharp and intelligent. Crawly squirms.

“I, ah, I was just --”

“Would you like to be cleansed, my child?” The baptist releases the man in his arms to dry land. When Crawly remains silent, he presses on. “The honor would be all mine.”

Crawly doesn’t like how this baptist seems to look right through him, like he knows something about Crawly none of the others do. Like he knows, perhaps, what he is. Crawly steps forward hesitantly. He does not know what possesses him to do so. (A demon, possessed by some holy influence. There’s a punchline for that somewhere). 

The water is refreshingly cool. The baptist holds out a hand for Crawly. He takes it. The baptist's arms are firm and gentle around Crawly’s shoulders. “Oh Lord, I pray that you cleanse this child and accept him into your loving arms.” And before Crawly has time to sputter his indignation -- he does not need Her forgiveness, thank you very much -- the baptist dips him backwards into the water. 

This is not like the last time he was breathless underwater. This is not like drowning. Crawly lets a stream of air bubbles loose from his mouth. He opens his eyes and watches the desert sun dapple along the surface of the water. When he emerges, when he is heaved from underwater, it is with startling clarity.

“Be blessed,” the baptist says, smiling.

Crawly swipes wet, tangled hair out of his eyes. He blinks at the baptist. “Uh, thanks.” He walks onto dry land, wringing out the hem of his robes. He finds a flat rock set off from the group and sprawls out on the slab. It won’t take too long too dry off in this baking heat. 

That night, he thinks of changing his name. When next he encounters the angel Aziraphale, it is the first time he utters his new name aloud. 

“It’s Crowley now. Changed it.”

“Oh, well, I -- Alright. Crowley. Is that allowed?”

“I did it, didn’t I? Besides, demons don’t follow rules, or have you forgotten?”

“Maybe you should so I wouldn’t have to thwart so many of your wiles.”

“Oh, come on, angel. Isn’t that what you like best about me?”

* * *

It’s poetic. Really, it is. The irony doesn’t escape him, engulfed as it is in hellfire. And in an angel’s body, no less. The archangel Gabriel stands before Crowley, just like the old days before the Fall, and gapes at the flames that touch his body within burning. Crowley laughs, and laughs harder at the sound of it coming from Aziraphale’s mouth.

Heaven is no less stuffy and ascetic as it used to be. If anything, the place has gone a little downhill since Crowley left. Where Hell is a backwater dump, Heaven is all vacant space. The bastards couldn’t even take a stab at tasteful modernism and really, that’s their greatest sin. To think that he’d ever missed this place at all… well, it’s no wonder why the Almighty Herself feels so absent from this place: the feng-shui’s all off.

Crowley shoots a jet of flame at the archangel Gabriel. A good scare would do him well. And when the fire dies down and the angels let Crowley-as-Aziraphale walk free -- stunned, he notes appreciatedly, like nothing he’s ever seen before -- he does not spare even a quick glance back. Leaving, this time, the second and final time, is perhaps the easiest thing he’s ever done.

Crowley dives over the edge of Heaven. Back to Earth, back to home, back to Zira.


End file.
